Stories
by antepathy
Summary: That requisite fandom piece with the female OC that everyone thinks is a Mary Sue self-insert. Max, Sandro, OFC.


Max stared at himself in the tarnish-speckled mirror, trying to see the exoskeleton. Or rather, trying to see himself beyond the sharp black angles and broad plates. Frey. All he could think about was Frey, how he could never bring himself to see her again, not like this. Would she even notice, remember, care when he didn't show up on Wednesday, or would she just write it off as Max Da Costa, reprobate?

Neither answer was flattering.

"Hey, let's go," Sandro poked his head inside the dingy bathroom. "Got places to go, man."

"What places?" His eyes clung to the mirror, to the black thing that crowded over him like a spider, his voice still sounding a bit befuddled, ungrounded.

"Gonna go see Jackyl, man."

The Jackyl. Max remembered the name, distantly, from the past, when he worked for Spider. One of his better coders, money launderers. No one saw the Jackyl, at least back then. He worked from a distance, alone. "Why?"

"Boss man said so's all you need to know," Sandro said, tartly. "Gotta make sure our one shot at this, stuff goes down right."

"What's a coder got to do with it?" Especially the Jackyl. Seemed pretty big guns. Then again, this was a big operation, at least for Spider.

"You'll see," Sandro said, with that quick flashing grin of his, gesturing 'come on' with his hand.

Spider must have been damn serious about this op, because they went by car, Sandro silent, at the wheel, giving Max time to think, staring moodily at the dust-kicked morning streets they rolled down. Everything looked so…normal, like any other day Max could remember, except for the fact that Max was dying and desperate. The seat sagged under his added weight, the torn vinyl catching in the piston heads, until he squirmed straighter.

His whole body hurt, bone-dull aches through his limbs and joints, the insertion sites sore and strained with each hydraulic movement. Sandro had told him it would go away, but he hadn't brought himself to ask when. It would do him no good to know he'd be just peachy…after dying from radiation.

No. Stop thinking like that, Max. You're going to get to Elysium and it'll be just like he and Frey had always told each other: Elysium would fix everything. You just have to push through this, get through it, endure. You made it through three years of prison. You can do this.

The car rolled to a stop before he could second-thought himself. It wasn't that far: maybe Spider didn't like to spread his network too far afield. The sunlight, after the car's dust-caked, tinted windows, seemed almost blindingly bright, and all he could do was push the pain aside, and focus on following Sandro's shoulders, through a paint-peeling doorway. The Jackyl's place.

Someone's place, at any rate.

He'd never seen anything like it: walls covered floor to ceiling with cheap plywood and bracket shelves, piled with worm-eaten books, some swollen from old water damage, some with broken, white-veined spines, looking as crippled as he felt.

"Jackyl!" Sandro called, moving toward the doorframe at the far end, separated with string after string of plastic beads. Primitive alarm, Max's brain recorded, blankly—no one could get through that without making noise.

"Heard you pull up." A voice that Max just registered as female before the figure stepped through the bead curtain, with a clatter of bright plastic. The Jackyl was a woman. He felt stupid, and obvious, the way he gaped at her. She was shorter than he was, about Sandro's height, and as pale as any stereotyped coder/hacker he could imagine. The clothes were unremarkable, the almost-uniform of LA sprawl for the heat, but she had a…thing on her head, like a towel or turban or mess of scarves or something.

"Sandro," she said, nodding, before turning to Max.

"Hey, so here he is," Sandro said, "Can I get a drink?"

"I can see that." She shrugged. "You know where the fridge is."

Sandro bobbed in a nod, slipping through the curtain, and then Max was alone with her.

"So," she said, stepping closer. "You're the lucky bastard that got stuck with this little pipe dream of Spider's."

"Yeah. That'd, uh, be me." He didn't like the sound of it, but it didn't make it less true. The rig made him feel huge and clumsy, especially as she got nearer. "Not feeling so lucky, though."

"Yeah, well, you're working for Spider. Kind of goes with the territory." Her eyes trailed over the exoskeleton, and then she gestured toward the back room. "Let's get started."

He hesitated. "Uh, started with what?"

Jackyl tapped the side of her head, finger hitting a bunch of scarves. "Getting you set up for this." She slipped through the curtain. Max followed, acutely aware of the hydraulic hisses with each movement as he did.

Sandro was perched on a table, a sweating can of beer in his hand, the rest of the room dimly lit from one casement window. There was an L-shaped desk, backing the back wall, with a computer screen that cast sky blue light over the room.

"Sandro's crew are the hardware experts. Software, well, that's my job." She hooked out a foot, dragging a rolling chair out from under a desk. "Have a seat."

He sat down, hands awkward on his lap, remembering why he hated working for Spider. Too many things out of his control, for one.

Jackyl twisted behind the desk, squatting down and digging, before coming up with something that looked like a graphing calculator, then moving around behind Max. He tried to turn, only to have the chair's seat stopped by her leg. "Just let me set this up," she said, voice low, behind his ear, that distracted tone of someone doing something kind of delicate. "First thing we're going to do is check the download. That's to make sure when you get your mark, you don't corrupt the data as you take it."

"Download's fine," Sandro said. "We do our job good."

"Better safe than sorry, Sandro. Besides, this way it's on me, not you, if something goes wrong."

"Good point." Sandro winked, the tear tattoo on his cheek twitching.

"First thing."

Jackyl came around, kneeling in front of him, nodding. "Then we get your trial run downloading data."

"Sounds…fun."

"It's something, that's for sure." A flash of a smile, before Jackyl reached over for the calculator-looking thing, reaching over Max's left shoulder, fishing a wire from behind him, dangling from his neural hookup. "This part won't hurt, promise."

That sounded entirely unencouraging. Discouraging. Whatever the word was. Still, he'd signed onto this: what choice did he have.

"Ready?"

He nodded, grimly, squeezing his eyes shut, waiting for…whatever.

It felt like a tingle, at first, like something crawling across his scalp, but from the inside. Jackyl looked up, studying his face. "You all right?"

"Yeah. Fine. Feels weird." Not bad. Just weird.

"It's not as good as a real Elysium-grade implant," she said, as if that explained anything. He gave a vacant nod, trying to process the feeling in his skull, tingling, light, strange.

She looked down at the screen in her handheld, then up at Sandro. "Download's clean."

"Told you so," Sandro said, lounging on the table, crossing his ankles.

"You know, you could just take it as a compliment."

"Where's the fun in that?"

He took another sip of his beer, wiping a condensation-wet hand down his jeans.

"Point." She turned back to Max, and for the first time the easy mask seemed to slip. "Now for the fun part." She reached for a plastic crate, upending it to perch on it, facing Max, her hands moving to the mass of fabric on her head, unwinding it with the ease of long practice. Max had no idea what was going on, watching as she peeled off the layers to reveal a black bulk of an implant, almost like his, grafted to the back of her head, scalp bald like any parolee's.

"How…?"

"Little gift from the Justice System. I used to be, well, a political dissident. I wrote pamphlets after they closed the schools. Did six years for it." She looked around the small box of a room. "Unemployable, afterwards, of course, because I'm not allowed a job. I could warp people's minds, I guess, with all these dissident ideas." The smile was more bitter than she probably realized.

"If you have one, how come you didn't-?"

"Didn't get roped into Spider's plan?" Another shrug and a tap on the implant. "Failsafe. If I go anywhere near anything Elysium official, poof. Mind blown, and that's not a metaphor."

That was something he hadn't thought of: Max's hand reached to his implant in a sudden rush of panic.

Jackyl shook her head. "No, that implant's clean. You're good." She reached for another cable, connecting them, scooting closer to Max, her knees between his, bumping the edge of the chair. He felt huge and awkward, capable of only sitting stupidly, helplessly. "For our purposes, though, this will read as an Elysium implant."

"Will it hurt?"

A bark of laughter from Sandro, echoed by Jackyl. "It will hurt like someone's set off a neutron bomb in your skull," she said, bluntly. "But at least you'll know it's working."

"Comforting." Not really. Kind of the opposite.

"Forewarned is forearmed," she said. "Now, you ready?"

No. How the hell could anyone be ready for this? Spider's plans always did sweep him along like a leaf in a gutter, spinning and wild. But she wasn't waiting for an answer, slotting the contact into her implant.

She hadn't lied: It felt like his skull was bursting itself apart along its sutures, blowing outward in a spray of white and red.

"You have this." It took a second for the words to filter through, the sounds to slide into sense. And he could feel it, like a rush or a cascade, like a hose of water flooding into him, snatches of files: code and numerical strings, then visual, sound, smell, memories of words, conversations, everything swirling at high pressure around his head.

"Yeah," he croaked, trying to see, to switch his vision back and forth from the flood of data to what was in front of him, around him. He couldn't afford to get lost in it, distracted, when it was Carlyle in front of him. "I got this."

And then it ended, just as abruptly as it had begun and he felt a little dizzy, head swimming. He swallowed, thickly, barely registering as she reached over his shoulder again, unhooking the cable.

"You did fine," she said, the hand dropping to pat his shoulder between the cage of metal pistons. "Hey, Sandro, get a drink for, uh…him."

"Max," Max said, scrubbing a hand over his face, the plastic and mesh of the glove rough against his suddenly-clammy skin.

"Max," Jackyl repeated.

He heard Sandro move behind him, and then he felt a hand on his wrist, coaxing his hand open, pressing a cold cylinder into it. "Just soda," Jackyl said. "The sugar's good for you."

"First time I think anyone's ever said that," he said, with a tired smile.

She laughed, high and relaxed, before bending down to pick up the scarves on the floor, beginning to wind them around her head again.

Max took a long drink, feeling the cold and the sweetness rush through him, steadying him, sweeping the dizzy fog from his head. "Why you do that?"

She stopped, looking over at him. "Do what?"

"Cover it up?"

A lopsided grin. "Vanity, or something like it. I just think it's ugly."

He grunted, looking down at the soda can in his black-gloved hands. "Yeah. Know the feeling." He gave a shrug, the hydraulics hissing.

"You?" She finished tying up her head wrap. "I don't know. I think it looks pretty good on you." She leaned forward, hooking two fingers under one of the clavicle struts, tugging up. He felt pressure along the strut, from the attachment points on his sternum, the head of his humerus. "Give a girl some interesting handholds, if nothing else."

He choked, feeling his face flush with embarrassment.

"You're a damn freak, Jackyl," Sandro chuckled, behind him.

"Says the guy with all the ink on his face."

"Don't mind her," Sandro slapped a hand on Max's back, fingers clapping against two of the pistons over his shoulderblade. "Bark is worse than her bite."

"Like you'd know anything about either," Jackyl said, wrapping the cable that had connected them around two fingers.

Sandro made a face, and then tapped Max's shoulder again. "Time to head out, man."

Jackyl shook her head. "Let him sit a few more minutes, at least till he finishes his soda, okay? Unless Spider's got you on that short a leash." She tilted her head, challenging.

Sandro settled back against the table. "May need another beer."

"You forget where the fridge is already?" Jackyl shooed him off. Max was so used to his own relationship with Spider, strained, antagonistic. It was almost a surprise to see people, you know, getting along. It was all he could do to watch, taking it in. "It won't be this bad next time—the systems are initialized now."

"I'll try to be reassured." He felt a little better, some of his old spark flaring up. Still, he was relieved to just sit, take a few moments from the small store he had and just try to be, trying to feel life coursing through his veins. "What's with all the books?" Because they were everywhere, even on the computer table, piled in the windowsill, everywhere. He rested the can on the desk, picking up a book and leafing through one, a picture book of great glossy photographs: places with exotic, foreign names like Stonehenge, Angkor Wat, Saqqara.

"Imagination, history, you name it," Jackyl settled back on the crate, looking at the book's pictures upside down. "Nobody wants them anymore."

"History?"

"Stories," she said.

"Yeah, well, most of us are probably busy just trying to get by." Day after day, shifts at Armadyne, bland meals at the cantina. "Don't have time." But suddenly the last year, day after day, hot and hazy and the same, seemed arid, empty. He promised himself he wouldn't settle for that again. Not after he got to Elysium.

"Hmm. But that's just it. Without hearing other people's stories, we can't make sense of our own. We don't even realize they're supposed to make sense."

Make sense. Did Max even have a story? He didn't think so. Just a random lurching from hope to diminishing hope, a dying spiral that circled nothing. He wondered if there was a story in any of her books that matched that, that made just wanting to live into something important, something that mattered.

He didn't think so.

But maybe one day, he'd have the vantage point, and he'd look back on everything and it would all fall into place, like a coder's file, like a city seen from far away, everything orderly and holding meaning. He could hope. He'd try to hope, at any rate.

"Ey, you wanted him to stay here so you could spout your crazy theories at him," Sandro said. "She's always going on about stories and meaning and destiny, man."

"Maybe one day you'll find out it's not so crazy, hey, Sandro?"

"Yeah, sure, some day. Could happen." He tapped on Max's shoulder. "Come on, Max, destiny awaits."


End file.
